MSU Researchers Honored for Outstanding Genetics Article

A team of Michigan State University researchers has been honored for having one of the top three articles published in the journal Genetics in 2015.

Richard Lenski, MSU Hannah Distinguished Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics; Rohan Maddamsetti, his former Ph.D. student and lead author; and post-doctoral research associate Jeffrey Barrick, authored the paper that reconstructed the dynamics of 42 mutations over 20,000 generations of bacterial evolution.

The paper was published in June 2015.

The article is one of three that earned the Centennial Award by the Genetics Society of America and the editorial board for Genetics. The awards were inaugurated this year in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Genetics.

The Lenski team earned the First Centennial Award for Population and Evolutionary Genetics.

Maddamsetti recently completed his Ph.D. in evolutionary biology at MSU and will start a postdoctoral position in the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School in the fall.

Lenski’s long-term experiment, cultivating cultures of fast-growing E. coli, was launched in 1988 and has allowed him and his teammates to study nearly 65,000 generations of bacterial evolution.

His work has received a great deal of media attention from outlets including NPR, the New York Times, Science and New Scientist. In fact, Science referred to Lenski as “The Man Who Bottled Evolution.”